No. 17, August 18, 2009
The roots of fundamentalist rage
Displays of rage, even hysterical rage, were seen at recent U.S. town hall meetings where Democratic congress members sought to put forward the case for President Barak Obama’s healthcare reform proposals.
Angry people showed up at these meetings to scream about the health care plan because it would allegedly set up “death panels” to eliminate the elderly and infirm, and they compared Obama with Hitler.
According to the media coverage, most of them were white and working class. Most are also probably fundamentalist or evangelical Christians.
Where did such an obviously false idea come from and why are people willing to believe it?
Frank Schaeffer has an answer for that – he says he himself helped start the myth 30 years ago as part of the campaign against abortion rights.
In an article posted August 12 on Alternet, Schaeffer describes himself as having been a Republican far right activist and evangelical from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. He was involved in the formation of the evangelical-led wing of the anti-choice movement.
Movement propaganda claimed that legalization of abortion would lead to legal infanticide and euthanasia, and pointed to the Nazis’ killing of the disabled and mentally ill on eugenics grounds.
“We successfully (and as it turned out completely mistakenly) linked legalized abortion to a ‘slippery slope’ that would inexorably lead to an American Holocaust against the elderly and infirm,” writes Schaeffer, now a supporter of Obama and healthcare reform.
The lobbying groups, the insurance industry and the far right wing of the Republican Party have now seized on these ready-made arguments with “cynical cleverness” to frame their “anti-healthcare reform tirade,” he states.
The anti-healthcare furor in the U.S. is fuelled by other particular elements such as the pervasive American distrust of government, along with the pressures of job losses, home foreclosures and debt resulting from the economic crisis.
But this kind emotionally charged, religiously based politics is also to be found elsewhere in similar social contexts. The point is made by American scholar Barton Stein in The History of India (Blackwell 1998).
“Communalist politics in India, like fundamentalist politics in the Middle East and the United States, reflect the interests and fears of the large segment of the lower-middle class whose economic and social security is ever at hazard and is so perceived,” he writes.
Members of the lower-middle class or working class are one the hand in danger of being crushed by the forces of modern capitalism, Stein states, while on the other hand they are threatened by the demands of the poor for social justice.
“The lower-middle classes in India, as everywhere else it seems, wrapped the vulnerability of their economic position in religious symbols – saffron, here, black there. In India, in Iran and in Texas, these symbols signify conventional righteousness and the preservation of things as they are.”
Politicians in India, Iran and elsewhere exploit these sentiments with the same “cynical cleverness” that those in the U.S. are demonstrating, and outbursts of savage violence can be the result. Schaeffer acknowledges that the anti-abortion movement’s rhetoric has led to murders of doctors and acts of violence against clinics, and fears what might follow.